Abstract
Global Labor Migration: New Directions provides its raison d’être on the book's opening page: two-thirds of those who leave their countries of birth do so for work. On a global scale, labor migrants make up 3.5 percent of the world's population. If one also includes China's internal labor migrants, that figure doubles to 7 percent of humanity (p. 1). Of course, these numbers do not account for the millions of additional people who depend on labor migration to survive. Globally, the money that labor migrants send back to their homelands is equivalent to 2.5 percent of the world's GDP. Remittances far exceed the assistance of development organizations (p. 122), while also serving as a more stable source of foreign exchange reserves for the global South than foreign direct investment (p. 123). More importantly, labor migration facilitates capital accumulation and arguably, therefore, holds the political power to challenge the status quo.
This volume, edited by Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, and Joo-Cheong Tham, thus urges scholars to take the cross-border movement of workers seriously and to do so without getting lost in the quagmire of disciplinary silos and sector-specific empirical minutiae. The book's contributions come from a mix of disciplinary perspectives, including history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, law, and gender studies. The empirical foci are also extensive. Case studies range from the experiences of seafarers working on board internationally trading cargo ships (Chapter 12) to the coolie depot system that imperial Britain used to distribute Chinese labor migrants across its territories (Chapter 1).
Despite its empirical range, Global Labor Migration is organized into four thematic sections. Part I examines how, in order to manage intra- and inter-imperial competition for migrant labor, colonial authorities relied on racist institutions that continue to have repercussions today, including for non-migrants. Adopting an intersectional feminist approach, Part II considers how capital's unwillingness to recognize migrants’ social relations—in short, their humanity—has produced myriad “disjunctures between income generation and the rest of life” (p. 8). Part III illuminates how states regulate migration, often in close cooperation with transnational corporations, labor intermediaries, and other private actors. Part IV, meanwhile, explains the genesis of global governance institutions (like the International Organization for Migration) while tracing how an ideological consensus about the supposed benefits of temporary guestworker programs has emerged over the twentieth century.
Although firmly rooted in extant scholarship, these four thematic clusters do not just represent academic debates. Each section also reflects the most pressing issues that migrant workers actually face. By examining the relationship between the British imperial administration of migration and contemporary anti-Black racism in the United Kingdom (Chapter 3) or the decolonization movements in Mozambique (Chapter 4), for instance, Part I forces readers to acknowledge that “colonialism is never too far away” (p. 61), particularly when considering the plight of migrant workers and their descendants. Similarly, Part II's deep dive into the experiences of a white Canadian sex worker in early twentieth-century Detroit (Chapter 5), Pakistani marriage migrants in deindustrializing England (Chapter 7), and Beijing-based couriers from the Chinese countryside all show how the commodification of migrant labor relies on patriarchal, sexist, and racist norms.
Part III, meanwhile, asks readers to think about the broader constellation of actors beyond states, such as labor unions (Chapter 9) and immigration detention centers (Chapter 10), that shape migrants’ working conditions. Finally, Part IV's historicization of the transnational efforts to “govern” migration (Chapters 13 and 14), culminating in the United Nations’ 2018 Global Compact for Migration (Chapter 15), forces us to think about what political opportunities, if any, global governance systems offer for labor organizing. Each part elucidates real-world issues and questions. That the book affirms the necessary relationship between theory and practice is unsurprising. As Boris et al. note in the Introduction, the initial idea for the volume emerged from a summit that brought together scholars and activists (p. 2).
Besides representing a philosophy of praxis, Global Labor Migration models what it means to challenge methodological nationalism. The cross-national comparison of Foxconn workers’ experiences, for example, reveals surprising similarities across its plants, thus belying the assumption that Europe necessarily provides better working conditions for migrant laborers than China (Chapter 11). Similarly, examining how immigration laws “traveled” across territories in the late nineteenth century reveals the complex inner workings of empire—such as the fact that military personnel did not always implement the metropole's exclusionary migration policies in the colonies (Chapter 2).
Also notable are the political insights we gain from attending to global-level patterns. For instance, while policymakers laud temporary migration schemes for generating more remittances, these so-called win-win labor arrangements obscure “systemic wage penalties” (p. 298). When we scale up, we see how guest-worker programs facilitate the “rotation of a reserve army of labor” while transferring numerous hidden costs—such as labor recruitment fees and financial risk—onto the workers themselves (p. 298). The resulting “temporality-precarity nexus” severely disenfranchises migrants, even if they manage to remit some of their earnings (Chapter 16). However, these same remittances binding migrants to contingent work may also be a source of political leverage. Scaling up our analytic frame reveals how desperate finance capital is to bank and securitize remittances (Chapter 6). Arguably, then, migrants could use their remittances for collective organizing and resistance. Methodological nationalism, therefore, is not just an ivory tower problem. It also inhibits political imagination and action. Removing these nation-state blinders, by contrast, can produce mobilizable knowledge.
Global Labor Migration would serve as a great teaching tool. The text is particularly amenable to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses about labor, globalization, migration, and political economy. Numerous chapters can also be the basis of modules demonstrating how migration regulation is not “neutral” but instead raced, classed, and gendered. Additionally, the essays discussing the ongoing impact of colonialism cohere with the pedagogical approaches that critical race and critical migration scholars are trying to advance in their classrooms. And as discussed above, the whole text could be used to demonstrate to students how a historical and transnational analytical frame yields empirically accurate and politically grounded insights about the social world.